What Games Are

Nobody Loves A Beggar [Marketing Stories]

 

For most studios the big problem these days is discoverability. When they make their game, get into the market and try to make sales, they discover that they are just one in a sea of many. They're not on the front page of the App Store, not being reviewed and not attracting fans. Nobody tweets about their game or likes their Facebook page.

So they try every kind of tactic they can think of to get precious eyeballs and clicks. For example: I receive a lot of automated newsletters, tweets, press releases and emails from game makers' publicists. Some even offer me money to write about their game. Similarly, many gaming websites are falling down with automated advertisements begging me to click, to play and to tell my friends.

What they are doing is begging for a response, like Shelley Levine in Glengarry Glen Ross. They need the exposure but the best tactic they can think of is using brute force to achieve it. If they can snag us, they hope, some of us will convert to customers and love them. But nobody loves a beggar. 

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Zyngapocalypse Now (And What Comes Next?)

Significant losses, declining ARPUs, failing mobile acquisitions and shareholder selloffs. A stock price down to $3.01. A product catalog repeating previous mistakes. Media coverage ranging from the mystified to "I told you so". A vague promise to get into gambling. Last week was miserable for Zynga and, as the bellwether of social games, was not good news for the whole sector. As Zynga goes, so eventually go Wooga, EA Playfish and countless others.

Both inside and outside the walls of Facebook, the story of social games has become one of dead geese and golden eggs, flatlined growth, formulaic games and shady practises. Many warned that the sector was slowing down, but sometimes giants need to fall. It needs to get bad enough before people start to really consider what's next.

So what comes next?

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Nobody Needs FarmVille 2 [Zynga]

One of the big differences between games-as-a-service and games-as-retail is that one is persistent while the other is instanced. In retail the franchise is powered by sequels, from Halo 4 to Mario Galaxy, because each represents a pulse of new interaction and fun to be had in a familiar world. However a service game like EVE Online or World of Warcraft is more like a Twitter or a Facebook.

Nobody needs or wants a Twitter 2 or a Facebook 2 because of the taxes involved in moving from one to the other. The same is especially true in service games, but this is a mistake that Zynga is on the verge of making for the second time in announcing FarmVille 2 at Zynga Unleashed.

Is The Facebook App Center A Big Deal?

Last year I posted that Facebook was effectively over as a disruptive game development platform. My reasoning was that Facebook relied too much on algorithmic solutions to drive visibility, which was then gamed by a few companies, and largely failed at introducing users to new games.

Unless Facebook were to produce a highly visible app store, I thought, Zynga had won. I also thought Facebook would not make such a store. Happily I was apparently wrong.

Your Game Is A Graph

Forget everything else for a moment and consider that your game is just a graph of users over time. There is more than one kind of viable graph, but knowing which kind you are aiming for is important. It should affect every strategic or marketing decision that you make. This week's news that Draw Something's user numbers have already dropped by 30% is significant, for example. It makes Zynga's purchase of it look like a lot of money spent based on misunderstanding that game's graph.

Do you know which kind of graph you are creating, and are you making the right choices to improve it? Are you targeting your monetization strategy in the right way, or are you basing it on a faulty understanding of its likely graph?

Is Google+ the Next Big Thing? [Platforms]

The social games industry sprung back into the news last week after a quiet few months with the exciting revelation that Google+ had officially opened up its games business. Offering a clean design, an attractive financial package and even a hosting solution, it seems like it could be the next hot ticket platform.

But is it?

I Think Facebook is Over [Social Games]

If Facebook games are an arms race, then Zynga have clearly won it. They have more users than their next nine competitors combined and a lock on cross promotion that can’t be beaten. Only Zynga is able to regularly make games that will acquire more than 20 million users, and they have been tenacious to a fault in dominating every channel they can find.

Meanwhile their competitors can only look on and stare at their own (mostly) declining fortunes. One publisher really does rule them all, and is about to IPO itself a couple of billion dollars to become as big as Activision. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

How Engagement Killed Gameplay [Language]

(with thanks to Casper Moller)

I used to hear the word gameplay bandied around by executives a lot. Everyone would say that their game was all about innovative gameplay, and believe it, even though most of their games looked and acted just like every other game. However something has changed.

Nobody in those meetings talks about gameplay any more. It seems to have fallen by the wayside. Now everyone’s talking about engagement. It’s changing the way that games are thought of, and so the kinds of games that are getting funded and developed.

Engagement has, in a sense, killed the ideal of gameplay, how we see games, and certainly how we will develop them in the future.

Art is the Best Business [What Games Are]

In response to yesterday’s post about forgetting the money, Jeremy Springfield kindly shared a presentation by Scott MacMillan. Scott’s presentation is about why his indie studio fell apart. His conclusion is that art and business are at opposite ends of a scale, so he thinks an indie studio must be in the middle somewhere. With sympathies to Scott for his studio’s fate, his framework is wrong.

Not only is art a business, it is the best business to be in. Madonna, Apple, James Herbert, Valve, Ogilvy, Terry Pratchett and Lady Gaga are all in the art business in one form or another. So are you. The questions are do you realise it, and do you understand how the art business works?

Are You Invisible? [Marketing Stories]

The Invisibility Differential Diagnosis:

• Your game is a console-movie tie-in
• Your game is on the App Store, on the second page of the Strategy category
• Your game is named something like Town Ville
• Your marketing strategy is based on exposure via Applifier
• Your game launched in the middle of the charts
• Your art style is inspired by a genre leader
• Your game design is trying to appeal to all four Bartle types
• Your PR strategy consists of talking about unique selling points
• Your indie game contains ordinary retro graphics
• Your game gets described by others as ‘it’s like A meets B’

I’m afraid the diagnosis is: you are invisible.